Tango is not only a fascinating dance, but also a fascinating idea, philosophy, culture, and lifestyle. In many ways, tango is a metaphor of life. The pursuit of tango is the pursuit of connection, love, unity, beauty, harmony and humanity, i.e., an idealism that is not consistent with the dehumanizing reality of the modern world. The world divides us as individuals, but tango unites us as a people and species. In tango we are not individualists, feminists, nationalists, liberals, conservatives, Democrats, Republicans, etc., but interconnected and interdependent members of the human family. We are humanists. Tango calls us to tear down the walls, to build bridges, and to regain humanity through connection, cooperation, reconciliation and compromise. If you share this conviction, please join the conversation and let your voice be heard, which is urgently needed and long overdue.

Together we can awaken the world.

March 3, 2012

Cadencia

Many people think of dancing to the music only as stepping on the beat, but there is much more to it. Dancing with cadencia, for example, is also a part of the equation. Cadencia means the swing of the body in correspondence with the rhythm and speed of the music. In other words, dancing to the music involves not only timing the steps, but timing the swings of the body as well. Cadencia is one of the key techniques in tango that is essential to the dance but often being overlooked.

To learn cadencia, you first need to learn to swing your body. Most people don’t even know how to swing their leg, much less to swing their body. To swing the leg, you need to stand on one leg and lift up your torso and hip until your free leg hangs loosely and can swing freely like a pendulum. You need to keep the knee and ankle of the leg straight while swinging it, so the leg looks long and graceful. Imagine, now, that your leg does not start from the hip but from the chest, that is, imagine everything below your chest is your leg. The chest is where you and your partner connect. It can serve as a fixed point to swing everything below it as a whole. That way, not only the line of your leg looks long and beautiful, but your whole body looks tall and elegant as well.

Swinging the body is like swinging a cudgel of three linked sections. The first section is the torso. The second section is the hip. The third section is the leg. A little motion of the first section will lead to a bigger motion of the second section, which will lead to a still bigger motion of the third section. The woman should relax her body and let the man swing her torso, which brings along the swing of her hip, which then brings along the swing of her leg. She should not move her leg first without the swing of her body, but should let the leg follow the body to swing. In other words, the swing of the leg is not caused by its muscle but by the swing of the torso and hip in a chain reaction under the law of mechanics.

The swing is in the horizontal direction. Many students fail to do cadencia because there is a lack of horizontal motion in their dance and they only focus on the vertical motion of stepping down on the beat. In order to do cadencia you need to generate enough speed in each step. (See Cadencia and the Flow of Tango.) The foot must land on the beat, but the horizontal motion of the body continues due to the momentum, carrying the body to pass over the center of gravity until the other foot lands on the beat. Cadencia is the motion of the body between two steps. It feels like the wave of water hits the rock, runs over it, then retreats, and hits the rock again, runs over, then retreats...

Cadencia is a teamwork and cannot occur without the lead. An experienced man knows how to use the inertia of the movement to swing the woman in correspondence with the rhythm and speed of the music. Men must be aware that whether the woman dances to the music depends to a large degree on the lead. Often, the woman fails to step on the beat because her body is led to swing too little or too much, too slow or too fast, disabling her foot to land on the beat. A skillful man generates just enough swing, so the woman’s foot may land exactly on the beat. Likewise, a skillful woman times the swing of her body and leg to the music as well. She complements the lead in her own capacity.

Cadencia is used in both social tango and performance tango, but it is primarily a social tango technique aiming at increasing the sensual pleasure rather than the visual impression of the dance. Dancing with cadencia requires not only excellent musicality but also superb balance control, which is not an easy task. But once you’ve learned to do it, the sensation of two bodies swinging together as one body in harmony with the rhythmic flow of the music will make the dance much more pleasurable. The following example illustrates this technique: